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The Broad: Class Hatred, Concentrated

Developers’ dreams notwithstanding, this remains a weird and uncomfortable part of the city, nestled as it is between multiple freeways and the massive homeless encampment that is Skid Row. There are few other parts of Los Angeles where the contradictions of capitalist real estate, of which Broad is a Donald Trump-level protagonist, are so clearly on display. Thus the location is fitting. The building itself is encased in a sheath of corrugated off-white webbing that screens the interior from its surroundings. Most of the perforations in fact conceal windows that are oriented to the rising and falling of the California sun, with the result that the upstairs galleries, at least, can boast some of the world’s most luxuriant natural lighting. These subtleties are little apparent from the street, however. A friend points out that the museum looks like nothing so much as the raw material of menudo: tripe, that is. But whereas menudo is a venerable hangover cure, one suspects that The Broad will remain a headache for some time to come.

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It is sometimes difficult to keep in mind that this abundance of very expensive art was assembled by only two people, so doggedly does it resist the detection of any guiding sensibility other than the sheer will to accumulate things upon which the market has left its stamp of approval. Such anomie may have social significance. This is how a class – a very small class – sees; this is how it dreams. And what banal dreams they are. For granting that insight, The Broad has some value. Yet there is a way in which discussing the details of the inaugural exhibition is entirely beside the point. The collection is a placeholder; one has the sense that it might as well be switched out for anything else of equal value, or painlessly liquidated should Eli Broad ever fall on hard times. Whatever their intrinsic merits, the works are significant, here, primarily as tokens of capital’s supremacy. This is true regardless of the fact that admission is free, and also of the fact that LA already has a multitude of institutions that bear the names of other tycoons (Getty, Hammer, Geffen…). The critique still has to be made anew, if only because the building is new, familiar as everything else about it may be. What this museum means has little to do with what it shows, and very much to do with the relations that it materializes simply by being what it is, where it is, and bearing the name that it does. The scandal is not that The Broad is bad, but that it exists.